Born in Berlin to a middle class Jewish family in 1858 which had converted to Christianity.

Simmels father died when Georg was very young, and he was not close to his mother.

Simmel experienced social marginality both in the family and in his academic life.

Simmel saw the social life of contemporary societies as creating social marginalization, but as opposed to Marx, Durkheim, and Weber, he saw this a having positive attributes.

3Simmels Life

Attended the University of Berlin

Doctoral thesis on the philosophy of Immanuel Kant

Simmel was in the midst of a thriving intellectual German community

Jews and radicals were marginalized from this community Simmel among them

Because he could not secure a permanent academic position, Simmel became a lecturer living off student fees

4Simmels Life

He became enormously popular among students and offered courses on a wide array of subjects logic, ethics, philosophy, political science, psychology, sociology

Simmel experienced anti-Semitism and the jealously of the academic community

Simmel finally became a full professor in 1914, only to die 4 years later

5Intellectual Influences Max Weber

Simmel and Weber were very close friends and intellectual peers

Simmel disagreed with Webers search for historical particularities, and instead focused on invariant laws of social life

Simmel and Weber both offered challenges to the Marxian critique of the capitalist political economy

6Intellectual Influences Herbert Spencer

Simmels first sociological work Social Differentiation (1890) was indebted to Spencerian sociology

Simmels later work maintains this focus of the importance of differentiation and more importantly the relevance of social structures in social life

7Intellectual Influences Immanuel Kant

Kant is interested in what he calls pure reason based upon a categorical imperative

The transcendental aesthetic is that by which human beings transform the buzz and chaos of the phenomenal world into meaningful order

This creates a transcendental logic whereby perceptual knowledge is transformed into conceptual knowledge

8Intellectual Influences Immanuel Kant

sense knowledge ? perceptual knowledge ? conceptual knowledge

what drives this process is a structured set of categories which are embedded in the human mind

whereas Kant argues that structures exist in the mind, Simmel modifies Kants argument by suggesting that structures exist in social relationships

Simmel asks the question what are the basic forms of interaction, or structures which affect social action?

9Intellectual Influence Karl Marx

Simmel argues against Marxs labor theory of value for Simmel the price of a product is based upon supply and demand, and social desire (social distance)

The greater the difficulty in obtaining an object, the greater its value.

Simmel argues that alienation is natural in a society which is large, complex, and highly differentiated, and that competition is an important factor in the reduction of social alienation free competition increases the free circulation of social exchanges

Money is not as oppressive commodity, as Marx contended, but is instead a generalized medium of social exchange which increases social interaction

The ultimate tool

10Simmels Approach to Sociology

What makes sociology different from other disciplines?

Isnt it just an arbitrary label?

Simmel says no.

Sociology is the study of social interaction and the consequences of social interaction.

11Simmels Approach to Sociology

Simmels three questions

What is society?

How should sociology study society?

What are the problem areas of sociology?

12Levels and Areas of Concern

Macroscopic assumptions about the psychological components of social life

Sociological components of interpersonal relationships

Structure of, changes in, cultural spirit of his times

higher levels emerge out of lower levels

if society is to be an autonomous object of an independent science, then it can only be so through the fact that, out of the sum of the individual elements that constitute it, a new entity emerges otherwise all problems of social science would be those of individual psychology

Ultimate metaphysical principles of life

13Simmels Approach to Sociology

Groups and the Forms of social life

The Geometric Metaphor Focus on Form over Context (goals, values, purposes, etc.)

Sociologys Problem Areas

General/Historical Sociology focus on invariant patterns of form (and content, while distinguishing both)

People produce culture, but we can reify social reality, the cultural world and the social world come to have lives of their own, lives that come to dominate the actors who created and daily re-create them.

Over time objective culture exerts more control over the individual.

Individual (subjective culture) is the capacity of the actor to produce, absorb, and control elements of the objective culture.

27Objective Culture

Grows and expands in various ways

Absolute size grows with modernization

number of different components of the cultural realm grows

Elements of cultural world become more entwined in an ever more powerful, self-contained world that is increasingly beyond control of the actors.

28Objective Culture

Simmel worried what would happen to individual culture

The total value of something increases to the same extent as the value of its individual parts decline. (Simmel 1907/1978199)

? tragedy of culture

29More-Life and More-Than-Life

Simmels answer to Marxs fetishism of commodities.

People possess a transcendent ability

First, creative capacities (more-life), people are able to transcend themselves.

Second, this transcendent, creative ability makes it possible to produce sets of objects that transcend them.

What weve created (more-than-life) come in opposition to more-life that produced objects in the first place.

developed an interest in urban environments and the social alienation they produce

the modern world creates a blasé attitude

the stranger

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